Key metrics to track on Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an incredibly valuable tool that many businesses use today to help them with their decision-making for both their website and business.

It’s so effective in helping to understand and identify what is and isn’t functioning well, as it takes real-time data and turns it into figures and reports that can help you to identify the required action to be taken.

But, when you first venture into the Google Analytics world, it can be very overwhelming.

There is an abundance of data and reports available to you, which can confuse anyone who has never used Google Analytics before.

So in this blog post, we’re going to discuss the key metrics you should be looking out for and what they mean for your website and your business.

Users and Sessions

This pair of metrics are some of the most important to pay attention to, as they tell us how many people have visited your website and how many times they have done so.

Tracking your users and sessions will help you to understand how your website is performing in terms of traffic to it and whether it is good enough to return back to.

Any potential highs or lows in either of these metrics are key indicators that further investigation is required.

Bounce rate

Your website bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that come to your website and then leave straight away, without taking any action.

Bounce rate can be used as a metric to measure how good your website is at capturing the users attention.

A high bounce rate could be an indication that your website isn’t user friendly or that the copy or content of the website requires improving.

Landing and exit pages

Knowing which pages are bringing users to your website and which are forcing them away is a handy insight to have.

Landing pages indicate what the user is being attracted towards, which can then be replicated across other website pages.

Exit pages on the other hand are the pages that your users like the least, as they’re the last page they will see before leaving.

This suggests that work is required to ensure that these pages help to move the user on through the experience.

However, it is important to note that some pages are intentional exit pages and these are the pages we want the user to be taking an action on.

Example pages can include newsletter sign ups or contact us pages.

Channels

Understanding where your traffic originates from is critical for attracting more people to your site.

Knowing this will help you to choose which marketing activities your company should prioritise.

These channels are:

• Direct – When a user lands directly on your website.
• Referral – When a user visits your website from another source that isn’t a social media platform or search engine.
• Organic Search – When a user clicks on a listing within a search engine results page (SERP).
• Paid Search – When a user clicks on a paid search ad.
• Social – When a user arrives to your website via a social media platform.
• Email – When a user comes directly from email marketing (however this can only be measured if UTM tagging has been put in place).
• Affiliates – When a user arrives via an affiliate partner.
• Display – When a user clicks on a display ad from another website.
• Other Advertising – When a user arrives to the website via any other type of online advertising.

Understanding channel performance gives you a good indication of what is and isn’t working for driving targeted traffic to your website.

Goal completion and conversion rate

In our opinion, probably the most important metric within Google Analytics as it tells you if your website is converting or not.

Be aware that goal tracking does require you to set up your goals within the tool, they will not be tracked automatically. However, this can be easily done within the ‘Admin’ section.

It is very important that the goals that you track are those that are fundamental to your business’s performance and not vanity metrics.

Goals you should be tracking are things like newsletter sign-ups, marketing asset downloads, online enquiries etc.

These metrics show you exactly how well your website is contributing to the ongoing success of your business.

Lasting thoughts

Google Analytics is a platform that has many features and metrics that can really help you and your business make better decisions.

But the experience can be overwhelming and difficult to understand if you’re not clear on what metric to monitor.

By monitoring these key metrics, you will have a better understanding of what may or may not be working well, clearing the way for further investigation.

However, should you be looking for a more extensive understanding of your website’s performance, then there are specialists who can help you to navigate what can feel like a data mine field.